Where Imagination Meets Sustainability

We get some highly interesting visitors at the artist's community where I live. My housemate Dave Hippchen is an actor, and he lived in Florida before he came out to Los Angeles last year. He has friends from there who have formed their own production company, Cinemap. Their names are Josh Horn and Dan Maninna and they are Emmy-nominated producers who worked for PBS prior to forming their own company, where they work on projects combining art, culture and environmental sustainability. Here is their website:

http://explorecinemap.com/

They are currently traveling around the country and were in California to pitch a new show they are developing called Canvas Earth. The tagline for it is "Where Imagination Meets Sustainability," a good description of their whole ethos. The pilot episode features a community in East Africa that is totally self-sufficient and produces amazing artworks from reclaimed glass refuse.

Here is the site for that show - it gives a really good idea of their general focus:

http://www.canvasearth.tv/

The Sugar Shack, where I live, is a community whose primary purpose is to foster creativity, but which also has a big focus on becoming more self-sustaining and environmentally sound. We have housemates past and present whose professional work involves environmental concerns (scientist Ryan Wartena, architect Elizabeth Marley and green entrepreneur Jedi Wright among them) and they want to get us off the local electrical grid and into solar energy, and move our water usage into a system that recycles our runoff for further distribution (conserving a precious resource in an area prone to prolonged dry spells and shortages). We are also planting a drought-resistant garden to replace a more conventional one, and several housemates are pushing for a compost bin to reduce our waste impact. We were all happy to learn about this show. It covers an area of overlap that could use more exploration, namely the connection between the creative impulse and that of preservation of the planet. I am schooled in the arts and not so much in environmental studies, but I am learning a lot living here, and it makes sense to me that artists would be among the first to commit to going radically green. The vanguard of thought includes both elements, and combining them seems like a very attractive way to make progress with global environmental concerns. The Cinemap guys have committed considerable energy and resources to their project, and it's very cool. Check the show out - hopefully it will be coming to television soon.